to the enemies who assailed us in this temple, was
unequal and unjust representation--political power wielded by a
dominant class, augmented by concessions on behalf of a disfranchised
and servile race, insultingly declared almost in the very citadel of
national justice as having no rights which a white man was bound to
respect. By this amendment we strike down the iniquity of one class
wielding political power for another, and arrogant because in the
exercise of unjust power."

Maintaining that representation should be based upon suffrage, Mr.
Lawrence said: "The reason which conclusively justifies it is, that a
people declared by law, if in fact unprepared for suffrage, should not
be represented as an element of power by those interested in forever
keeping them unprepared. But children never can be qualified and
competent depositaries of political power, and, therefore, should not
enter into the basis of representation. It never has been deemed
necessary for the protection of females that they should be regarded
as an element of political power, and hence they should not be an
element of representation. If the necessity shall come, or if our
sense of justice should so change as to enfranchise adult females, it
will be time enough then to make them a basis of representation."

Mr. Shellabarger, of Ohio, though having "fifteen times as much
respect for the opinions of the Committee on Reconstruction" as for
his own, yet suggested the following as objections to their report:

"1. It contemplates and provides for, and in that way, taken by
itself, authorizes the States to wholly disfranchise entire races of
its people, and that, too, whether that race be white or black, Saxon,
Celtic, or Caucasian, and without regard to their numbers or
proportion to the entire population of the State.

"2. It is a declaration made in the Constitution of the only great and
free republic in the world, that it is permissible and right to deny
to the races of men all their political rights, and that it is
permissible to make them the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the
mud-sills of society, provided only you do not ask to have these
disfranchised races represented in that Government, provided you
wholly ignore them in the State. The moral teaching of the clause
offends the free and just spirit of the age, violates the foundation
principles of our own Government, and is intrinsically wrong.

"3. The clause, by being inserted into th